Quotes About Existence

We started this chapter with three points: life wants to be; life doesn't always want to be much; life from time to time goes extinct. To this we may add a fourth: life goes on. And often, as we shall see, it goes on in ways that are decidedly amazing.

We enjoy not only the privilege of existence, but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better.

Indeed, it has been suggested that there isn't a single bit of any of us – not so much as a stray molecule – that was part of us nine years ago.

Behaviorally modern human beings—that is, people who can speak and make art and organize complex activities—have existed for only about 0.0001 percent of Earth's history

For all their devoted attention, your atoms don't actually care about you - indeed, don't even know that you are there

we can't see even into the Oort cloud, so we don't actually know that it is there. Its existence is probable but entirely hypothetical.1 About

Although the creation of a universe might be very unlikely, Tryon emphasized that no one had counted the failed attempts." Martin

Just reaching the centre of our own galaxy would take far longer than we have existed as beings.

It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of all the intoxicating existence we've been endowed with. But what's life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours – arguably even stronger.

Of the billions and billions of species of living thing that have existed since the dawn of time, most—99.99

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don't truly understand.

Life, in short, just wants to be.

Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so.

Gravity on this view is no longer so much a thing as an outcome—"not a 'force' but a byproduct of the warping of spacetime," in the words of the physicist Michio Kaku, who goes on: "In some sense, gravity does not exist; what moves the planets and stars is the distortion of space and time.

In some sense, gravity does not exist28; what moves the planets and stars is the distortion of space and time.

your atoms don't actually care about you - indeed, don't even know that you are there. They don't even know that they are there. They are mindless particles, after all and not even themselves alive. (It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which would have ever been alive but all of which had once been you.)

They simply exist, Attenborough adds, testifying to the moving fact that life even at its simplest level occurs, apparently, just for its own sake.

Not one particle of the heavy stuff so vital to our own being—carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and all the rest—emerged from the gaseous brew of creation. But—and here's the troubling point—to forge these heavy elements, you need the kind of heat and energy of a Big Bang. Yet there has been only one Big Bang and it didn't produce them. So where did they come from? Interestingly

Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours. And when that modest milestone flashes into view, or at some other point thereabouts, for reasons unknown your atoms will close you down, then silently disassemble and go off to be other things. And that's it for you.

tiny bag of chemicals twitched and became animate. We were on our way. Four

the atoms that so liberally and congenially flock together to form living things on Earth are exactly the same atoms that decline to do it elsewhere.

There is no law that requires the universe to fill itself with small particles of matter or to produce light and gravity and the other properties on which our existence hinges.

To be here now, alive in the twenty-first century and smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary string of biological good fortune.

A physicist is the atoms' way of thinking about atoms. Anonymous